Geez, doesn't this sound familiar. It looks like big brother isn't going to be the communists, or big government, or anything like that, it's going to be large corporations and other assorted big money players. Fucking nazis. They are a big fucking pain in the ass.
A moronic ISP (not the one this IP is attatched to, so piss off...) that i have to deal with from time to time at work has cracker insurance, and to keep that up they regulate what ports you can listen on, what OS versions you can run, and where you can peer/tunnel/etc... on your internal network. In any case, my suspition that they are a bunch of blithering idiots was confirmed when they dropped our link by fucking with our router (which they had drop shipped, black box style, and refused to tell us the passwords...) and as a last resort they called us and walked us through setting the link back up, and you know what? The dumb bastards keep the router passwords set at factory default. Oh well, i pitty the underwriter of their insurance policy...
This may take the release early release often a little far... Still looks quite young. But on the other hand, it reduces the chances of the project (or sometimes the author) being snuffed out before the public ever gets a chance to kick the tires. If i could encrypt my way out of a paper bag i'd help out with this one... Seriously though, i think there is a need for a more modern, updated secure way to do this sort of thing. I think it is helpful if people can read what they want without fear of being profiled by evil govenrments (or even worse persistant spammers...) and I think it will allow people a little more freedom to be themselves.
This should be a wakeup call for people who don't take their own privacy seriously. This should also be a wakeup call for congress when they approve funding every year for eschelon related activities. This should be a wakeup call for anybody who belives that nobody cares what they do with their private life.
It does make sense that average users are going to want a consistant (read "enforced") user interface so they can instantly know how to use any given piece of software. That makes sense from an end-user point of view, and that is fine, but as far as i'm concerned, end-users can go nibble a knob-end. I don't think non market-driven (read "not developed by big companies") open source software will be ready for those people any time soon, because those people are a pain to deal with, and programmers for the most part (at least these days) work on open source projects in their spare time, and to feed themselves and make rent they usually work for some evil corporation that writes software to please those users, and when they have to unwind at the end of the day, they write software that is relaxing and sane, and reverts to their idealistic dream of how simple it used to be back when they were first learning and had the docrtine of "Input->Processing->Output" drilled into their head, before all of this horrible "event-driven concurrent multithreaded bla bla bla..." stuff, all to support an essentially single threaded task on a single processor machine just so that some pissant user can click on stuff to vent their impatience while something happens from their last click. That rant being said, I am happy with the idea that users can continue to pay people like Macintosh to wrap all actual functionality in a standardized UI, and programmers can continue to do things more efficiently by using their unglamourous and cryptic tools. I also think that the GUI revolution is part of why users feel so clueless, and don't learn to program anymore. Somebody asked me to walk them through creating a hello world under windows the other day. I had to stop and think, either we go with simple C win32 thing, but to print text we have to jump through all these hoops, etc... and then the person will expect it to work like a teletype window, when actually they have to write that themselves, or aside from that, we can go use a MFC control for that, but that is it's whole other set of headaches. When i learned (c. 1987) things were _much_ simpler, and the bridge one had to cross from user to novice programmer was quite small. Nowadays, under a modern GUI-only OS, you have to pay several hundered dollars for a compiler/degger/editor suite, then you have to work your way through several textbook sized tomes just to make a simple GUI app with no functionality other than the GUI. It's a lot tougher now. Just some thoughts.
Personally, i don't care for wiretap protections. I think they are outdated, and i think that the idea of government regulation in the information industry is a stupid idea.
I'd have to say that Scorched Earth and clones are up there, along with DigDug, PlatMan (amiga) Mr. Do, Frenzy, MegaMan (nes), Galga, Sonic (sega), and a couple others i can't think of now... Quake3 is okay, but it doesn't have that timeless draw of those simpler scrollers and platform games.
Here is the catch. Once somebody crosses the ethical boundry from healthy competition to sleazy business (which microsoft did long ago...), then it works like an arms race, in that everybody has to hire a Cloak and Dagger department to stay afloat, because anybody without one gets screwed. I don't particualarly blame oracle in this situation. If microsoft was playing nice, within the bounds of ethical business practices, and oracle went and hired a detective, then i think that would be excessive/bad business. The trick is that they are in an arms race of sleaze, started by closed standards, and predatory marketing practices, so they did what they had to.
I like that idea. So the person who actually has the power and can be sued is the person who holds the secret that the update to the name record must be signed with to be accepted by the network. That puts the responsibility, and the power (they should go hand in hand) with the guy who registers the domain, and nobody else.
That is a good idea! If one were to implement a Gnutella like system where there is a sort of self-healing network of interconnected nodes, all of which can search eathother. Maybe something more like freenet where the content moves towards the consumers. There are two immediate problems with this, one technical, and one political. First the technical, because it's the most important (politics can go t hell for the moment...). The problem is that things like Round Robin DNS for server pools, and for those poor souls with dynamic IP's who still want to run a server, we need some sort of clever way to prevent this decentralized blob of servers from keeping stale name entries around. Maybe if each entry in the system got a UTC timestamp along with it's signature, and any server that had a previous copy would replace that with the new one, but it still has the capacity to stagnate. Maybe if when aquiring new links A La Gnutella, there could be some specific protocol provision for requesting at least a couple distant servers as peers to keep the average distance between any two servers small... I'm sort of sleep deprived, so i'm not sure if that would work, but how's it sound? The political problem is trying to overcome the F.U.D. that will be kicked up by the powers that be when a system is created that cannot be 'sued' and from which names cannot be revoked because they are offensive, or because some stupid corporation is scared of them (think or the etoy-etoys ruckus...).
This is neat, but i really wish that some company (possibly Tiqit) would come out with a transmeta based portable core without the LCD screen and plastic case, so that i could upgrade my wearable (a 486-66 was once cool, but...) Yeah.
Since nobody could be bothered to give you any dead tree-ware documentation anymore, you'd think they could slim down the boxes. All that space used to be taken up by manuals, but now it's empty. I think if they still want a big shiny surface to catch the eye, they could at least make it a big card with the jewel case and leaflet shrik wrapped on, sorta like how matchbox cars used to be packaged...
Hehehehe =:-) I think they had that book at the public library. I remember getting it out when i was a kid (or at least a book that had a similar explanaion method...) I think the one i was thinking of was a book that one was supposed to teach onself FORTH with. I gave up on that mainly because my FORTH interpreter on my Franklin Ace was hardly what you would call stable.
I still remember the little boxes hopping along the conveyer belt towards the ALU where they would be shelved until an operator came along =:-)
I remember when i was learning to program (somebody shoot me, i say that a lot, and it was only 13 years ago) there were a lot of books like that (although often using basic or pascal) and i got all of them out of the library again and again until i'd sucked them dry of information. They were informal, not too intimidating, fairly friendly, and most of all, they weren't snobby. SOme even had cool cartoons =:-) This has been missing in the age of the booming tech economy and the whole "professional image". I think the world needs this sort of a thing, so that novices can begin to experement, because it's fresh minds that generate a lot of the innovation, and i think that extending a bridge to users is a good thing.
This sounds neat. It appears to be a widget that falls between an In Circuit Emulator and a hardware monitor (like old computers usta have, remember? Like the Sun 350's had 'em, as did apple II's and old macintoys...) It does sound neat though. THe switch to CD's as a game distribution medium makes it much more in reach for people to produce small to medium runs of a game/demo/os/ etc.. they have created. =:-) Masking roms is expensive, and you need a larger run to make it worth it than mastering CD's. Also the boards to which the roms are attatched and the wacky edge connectors of traditonal cartridges are a bitch and a half if you want to only make a few of 'em. SO this is cool for up and coming hobbiests and those who wish to create games that are not considered marketable enough to be worth the bother of the large companies. This is cool =:-)
My question is this: Can an easter egg still be exciting if all the mystery is taken out of it. If i can download the source, i can look for the egg that way, and although i may not bother to read it all, i'm sure somebody has read any given portion, and the eggs will all be ferreted out fairly quickly. The other option would be to hide them by obfuscation, but i think that is a fairly irresponsible thing to do in a case where other people actually have to put up with your source. Now on the other hand, they could still be thrown in there to amuse users. Most of the pieces of software i use, honestly, i don't ever read through the source, i just build it and install it. I guess i'd still get a kick out of those then, but i think i'd go and read the code for the egg anyway.
KDE is looking better and better. I think my next computer is going to run linux and KDE. I think i'll give VMware a shot to see if i can run 98 in a window for those couple apps i just can't avoid (like VC6 for work, etc...)
We had a "random" crash on our SQL server (which was running without a case) on tuesday when the solar flare happened. Is that a coincidence? Who knows. Still a bloody pain in the ass.
It seems that there are already laws that cover this. I have often seen the creators of unwelcome self-replicating programs charged with "unauthorized use of a computer", (sorta like unauthorized use of a motor vehicle) which is an effective catch-all for people who do anything to take control over other people's computers without their consent. I think that the expedited creation of new laws in reaction to a phenomenon that most people in positions of power could never hope to understand, let alone competently regulate is a dangerous thing. I recognize that these legislators probably have teams of advisors, but i still worry about the original intent/usefulness getting diluted/lost in the legislative process.
We just need some good Intrusion Countermeasueres Engines like in Neuromancer. Something to bake the central nerveous system of script kiddies. Oh wait, they are already mostly baked anyhow. Oh wait, Where am i? Where are my pants?
Re:Grave of the Fireflies GOOD MOVIE
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 2
Very good move, very sad though. It's right up there with Wings (non-anime (Clara Bow, c. 1928)) for the saddest movie i've ever seen.
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Geez, doesn't this sound familiar. It looks like big brother isn't going to be the communists, or big government, or anything like that, it's going to be large corporations and other assorted big money players. Fucking nazis. They are a big fucking pain in the ass.
A moronic ISP (not the one this IP is attatched to, so piss off...) that i have to deal with from time to time at work has cracker insurance, and to keep that up they regulate what ports you can listen on, what OS versions you can run, and where you can peer/tunnel/etc... on your internal network. In any case, my suspition that they are a bunch of blithering idiots was confirmed when they dropped our link by fucking with our router (which they had drop shipped, black box style, and refused to tell us the passwords...) and as a last resort they called us and walked us through setting the link back up, and you know what? The dumb bastards keep the router passwords set at factory default. Oh well, i pitty the underwriter of their insurance policy...
This may take the release early release often a little far... Still looks quite young. But on the other hand, it reduces the chances of the project (or sometimes the author) being snuffed out before the public ever gets a chance to kick the tires. If i could encrypt my way out of a paper bag i'd help out with this one...
Seriously though, i think there is a need for a more modern, updated secure way to do this sort of thing. I think it is helpful if people can read what they want without fear of being profiled by evil govenrments (or even worse persistant spammers...) and I think it will allow people a little more freedom to be themselves.
This should be a wakeup call for people who don't take their own privacy seriously. This should also be a wakeup call for congress when they approve funding every year for eschelon related activities. This should be a wakeup call for anybody who belives that nobody cares what they do with their private life.
It does make sense that average users are going to want a consistant (read "enforced") user interface so they can instantly know how to use any given piece of software. That makes sense from an end-user point of view, and that is fine, but as far as i'm concerned, end-users can go nibble a knob-end.
I don't think non market-driven (read "not developed by big companies") open source software will be ready for those people any time soon, because those people are a pain to deal with, and programmers for the most part (at least these days) work on open source projects in their spare time, and to feed themselves and make rent they usually work for some evil corporation that writes software to please those users, and when they have to unwind at the end of the day, they write software that is relaxing and sane, and reverts to their idealistic dream of how simple it used to be back when they were first learning and had the docrtine of "Input->Processing->Output" drilled into their head, before all of this horrible "event-driven concurrent multithreaded bla bla bla..." stuff, all to support an essentially single threaded task on a single processor machine just so that some pissant user can click on stuff to vent their impatience while something happens from their last click.
That rant being said, I am happy with the idea that users can continue to pay people like Macintosh to wrap all actual functionality in a standardized UI, and programmers can continue to do things more efficiently by using their unglamourous and cryptic tools.
I also think that the GUI revolution is part of why users feel so clueless, and don't learn to program anymore. Somebody asked me to walk them through creating a hello world under windows the other day. I had to stop and think, either we go with simple C win32 thing, but to print text we have to jump through all these hoops, etc... and then the person will expect it to work like a teletype window, when actually they have to write that themselves, or aside from that, we can go use a MFC control for that, but that is it's whole other set of headaches. When i learned (c. 1987) things were _much_ simpler, and the bridge one had to cross from user to novice programmer was quite small. Nowadays, under a modern GUI-only OS, you have to pay several hundered dollars for a compiler/degger/editor suite, then you have to work your way through several textbook sized tomes just to make a simple GUI app with no functionality other than the GUI. It's a lot tougher now.
Just some thoughts.
Personally, i don't care for wiretap protections. I think they are outdated, and i think that the idea of government regulation in the information industry is a stupid idea.
Hehhehehehe =:-) That is a really funny idea =:-)
Yay! Sterilize the yuppies =:-)
I'd have to say that Scorched Earth and clones are up there, along with DigDug, PlatMan (amiga) Mr. Do, Frenzy, MegaMan (nes), Galga, Sonic (sega), and a couple others i can't think of now... Quake3 is okay, but it doesn't have that timeless draw of those simpler scrollers and platform games.
Here is the catch. Once somebody crosses the ethical boundry from healthy competition to sleazy business (which microsoft did long ago...), then it works like an arms race, in that everybody has to hire a Cloak and Dagger department to stay afloat, because anybody without one gets screwed.
I don't particualarly blame oracle in this situation. If microsoft was playing nice, within the bounds of ethical business practices, and oracle went and hired a detective, then i think that would be excessive/bad business. The trick is that they are in an arms race of sleaze, started by closed standards, and predatory marketing practices, so they did what they had to.
"We're Doomed!"
=:-)
I like that idea. So the person who actually has the power and can be sued is the person who holds the secret that the update to the name record must be signed with to be accepted by the network. That puts the responsibility, and the power (they should go hand in hand) with the guy who registers the domain, and nobody else.
THat sounds like a nifty idea.
That is a good idea! If one were to implement a Gnutella like system where there is a sort of self-healing network of interconnected nodes, all of which can search eathother. Maybe something more like freenet where the content moves towards the consumers.
There are two immediate problems with this, one technical, and one political. First the technical, because it's the most important (politics can go t hell for the moment...). The problem is that things like Round Robin DNS for server pools, and for those poor souls with dynamic IP's who still want to run a server, we need some sort of clever way to prevent this decentralized blob of servers from keeping stale name entries around. Maybe if each entry in the system got a UTC timestamp along with it's signature, and any server that had a previous copy would replace that with the new one, but it still has the capacity to stagnate. Maybe if when aquiring new links A La Gnutella, there could be some specific protocol provision for requesting at least a couple distant servers as peers to keep the average distance between any two servers small... I'm sort of sleep deprived, so i'm not sure if that would work, but how's it sound?
The political problem is trying to overcome the F.U.D. that will be kicked up by the powers that be when a system is created that cannot be 'sued' and from which names cannot be revoked because they are offensive, or because some stupid corporation is scared of them (think or the etoy-etoys ruckus...).
Oh well. *yawn*
I have a soldered on 486slc clone...
This is neat, but i really wish that some company (possibly Tiqit) would come out with a transmeta based portable core without the LCD screen and plastic case, so that i could upgrade my wearable (a 486-66 was once cool, but...) Yeah.
Since nobody could be bothered to give you any dead tree-ware documentation anymore, you'd think they could slim down the boxes. All that space used to be taken up by manuals, but now it's empty. I think if they still want a big shiny surface to catch the eye, they could at least make it a big card with the jewel case and leaflet shrik wrapped on, sorta like how matchbox cars used to be packaged...
Hehehehe =:-) I think they had that book at the public library. I remember getting it out when i was a kid (or at least a book that had a similar explanaion method...) I think the one i was thinking of was a book that one was supposed to teach onself FORTH with. I gave up on that mainly because my FORTH interpreter on my Franklin Ace was hardly what you would call stable.
I still remember the little boxes hopping along the conveyer belt towards the ALU where they would be shelved until an operator came along =:-)
I remember when i was learning to program (somebody shoot me, i say that a lot, and it was only 13 years ago) there were a lot of books like that (although often using basic or pascal) and i got all of them out of the library again and again until i'd sucked them dry of information. They were informal, not too intimidating, fairly friendly, and most of all, they weren't snobby. SOme even had cool cartoons =:-)
This has been missing in the age of the booming tech economy and the whole "professional image". I think the world needs this sort of a thing, so that novices can begin to experement, because it's fresh minds that generate a lot of the innovation, and i think that extending a bridge to users is a good thing.
This sounds neat. It appears to be a widget that falls between an In Circuit Emulator and a hardware monitor (like old computers usta have, remember? Like the Sun 350's had 'em, as did apple II's and old macintoys...) It does sound neat though. THe switch to CD's as a game distribution medium makes it much more in reach for people to produce small to medium runs of a game/demo/os/ etc.. they have created. =:-) Masking roms is expensive, and you need a larger run to make it worth it than mastering CD's. Also the boards to which the roms are attatched and the wacky edge connectors of traditonal cartridges are a bitch and a half if you want to only make a few of 'em. SO this is cool for up and coming hobbiests and those who wish to create games that are not considered marketable enough to be worth the bother of the large companies. This is cool =:-)
My question is this: Can an easter egg still be exciting if all the mystery is taken out of it. If i can download the source, i can look for the egg that way, and although i may not bother to read it all, i'm sure somebody has read any given portion, and the eggs will all be ferreted out fairly quickly.
The other option would be to hide them by obfuscation, but i think that is a fairly irresponsible thing to do in a case where other people actually have to put up with your source. Now on the other hand, they could still be thrown in there to amuse users. Most of the pieces of software i use, honestly, i don't ever read through the source, i just build it and install it. I guess i'd still get a kick out of those then, but i think i'd go and read the code for the egg anyway.
KDE is looking better and better. I think my next computer is going to run linux and KDE. I think i'll give VMware a shot to see if i can run 98 in a window for those couple apps i just can't avoid (like VC6 for work, etc...)
Anybody else tried this? (slightly offtopic)...
We had a "random" crash on our SQL server (which was running without a case) on tuesday when the solar flare happened. Is that a coincidence? Who knows. Still a bloody pain in the ass.
It seems that there are already laws that cover this. I have often seen the creators of unwelcome self-replicating programs charged with "unauthorized use of a computer", (sorta like unauthorized use of a motor vehicle) which is an effective catch-all for people who do anything to take control over other people's computers without their consent.
I think that the expedited creation of new laws in reaction to a phenomenon that most people in positions of power could never hope to understand, let alone competently regulate is a dangerous thing. I recognize that these legislators probably have teams of advisors, but i still worry about the original intent/usefulness getting diluted/lost in the legislative process.
We just need some good Intrusion Countermeasueres Engines like in Neuromancer. Something to bake the central nerveous system of script kiddies. Oh wait, they are already mostly baked anyhow. Oh wait, Where am i? Where are my pants?
Very good move, very sad though. It's right up there with Wings (non-anime (Clara Bow, c. 1928)) for the saddest movie i've ever seen.